Wth the tremendous growth in cloud services, cloud vendors can provide a full spectrum of technologies, including infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and software as a service (SaaS). It would be desirable for such cloud vendors to leverage their range of capabilities to provide highly scalable and performance-efficient services to their client, while keeping down the costs of procuring and running the underlying infrastructure.
However, the requirement for providing performance-efficient services and the requirement for keeping down infrastructure costs may be contradictory because providing high performance and scalability often involves expensive hardware.
As such, it would be desirable for a cloud vendor to provide an appropriate combination of different types of hardware, for example, hardware that provides good cost-performance ratio, and hardware that provides extreme performance for specific tasks.